Stories bring us together in
turbulent times. As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to impact lives globally,
every individual and every nation has its own narrative of how they endured.
How China used its authoritarian power to control the virus. How older
Europeans were disproportionately affected by the pandemic, with the
majority of all deaths in Spain, for example, being those individuals aged 70
years and above. How hardships prompted by the pandemic forced thousands of
women and transgender women into sex work in Mexico.
In India, a series of draconian
lockdowns imposed by the government at the beginning of the pandemic brought
the rate of infection down, but only temporarily, and the cost of it was
horrific on the country’s economy. With an almost entirely absent public health
system there, the country descended into “COVID
hell,” as hospitals ran out of oxygen cylinders for ill patients and
dead bodies began piling up in morgues and crematoriums and often along river
shores. Public health experts and international media estimate the
number of COVID-19-related deaths during the pandemic in India could be around
four-five million -- more than ten times the death toll of approximately
475,000 people reported by the Indian
government.
In Kenya, schools closed, and
thousands of children went to work, many as prostitutes. As an investigation by
Reuters
reveals, COVID-19 unleashed “shadow pandemics” on girls in Africa. “With
families unable to earn in lockdown, girls are married for a dowry or engage in
transactional sex, exploited by neighbors, drivers or other locals – just to
buy food.”
 |
| Voorhees, NJ, winter 2020 |
In the United States, the death toll
from COVID-19 has now soared above 800,000, which is more than half the
population of Philadelphia, as well as the number of Americans who died of
cancer in 2019. A continuing, wide-scale vaccination to counter the disease
dramatically brought down infections and fatalities and helped the country to
shed the virus gloom and at least enjoy a somewhat close-to-normal summer and fall
this year.
New variants of the virus continue to occur globally, with some spreading more easily than others, some being more severe than others and responding differently to treatments. Viruses, in some ways, are like us. They evolve over time, become stronger, and undergo various changes in their lives.
The pandemic is far from being over yet.
***
 |
| Orange day-lily, summer 2021 |
Psychologist Lawrence Kutner says
toddlerhood is like a musical fugue in which “the themes of intellectual,
physical, emotional, and social development intertwine.” The best thing that
babies teach us is that the fundamentals of our lives are simple: laughter,
cuddles, intimacy, learning, friendships, and spending time with a set of
people who are nice to us. They are therapeutic and corrective at times,
teaching us that they don’t care how fancy their birthday parties are going to
be, how expensive the car we drive is, or even how expensive car seats or
strollers we buy for them.
Brimming with confidence, kids are
eager to learn. As a parent, we seem to have learned a great deal about
parenting since the child was born. But as confident as we become, thinking
that we are really getting a hold of this parenting thing, something would
happen every day to remind us that there is still a lot more to learn. How do
you pacify a two-year-old baby throwing a tantrum and going boneless? How do
you tell the baby to use gentle hands while petting the dogs and not throwing
things on them because they are living beings and not animated, playful
objects? How do you make her understand that putting her hand inside her
friends’ mouth at the daycare [and getting bit] is not what she should be
doing? How do you tell her how funny it is to demand to watch the same nursery
rhymes and the same kids TV show every day for months?
A positive consequence of the pandemic has been to allow families to spend more time together amid a slowdown in daily life (conversely, this has also led to a significant rise in divorce and break-up rates globally). My daughter and I created our own chores and rituals: taking the dogs to our house backyard, helping me feed the dogs, letting her help make myself espresso every morning, long drives over weekends, daily drive to her daycare, making her fruit smoothie and popsicles on occasions.
Parenting is hard, very hard, but
closely witnessing tremendous social, emotional, and intellectual changes that
a toddler goes through after advancing from infancy is parenthood filled with
transcendent moments.
***
 |
| Keswick, VA, summer 2021 |
Winding through Albemarle and Orange
counties on Route 231 in Virginia this summer, when we finally managed to see
and spend a few days with my wife’s grandparents in Keswick, was as much as a
driving delight as the Pine Barrens, the largest Atlantic coastal pine barrens,
close to the home in South Jersey. The drive to/through Keswick via Route 231,
a two-lane country road, is one of the most scenic in America. As you drive,
the scenic views alternate between enclosures of leafy green tree canopies and
the sun-lit pastures of horse and sheep farms. I was reading in an article in the
New York Times that very little has changed in the town since a century ago.
Sitting in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a few miles east of
Charlottesville, the region is soaked in early American history, with much of
the areas having been the site of plantations in Colonial
days.
The areas around Chatsworth in Woodland Township of Burlington County in New Jersey are full of ghost towns housing ramshackle factories from industries no longer surviving. Nestling in the Pine Barrens, they are prime examples of a Garden State industry that is still thriving — cranberry farming. A drive on Route 563 offers one-of-a-kind views of red masses bobbing on flat bogs. In normal times, there is an annual cranberry festival, one of the best and most interesting festivals in the Mid Atlantic, every fall. With hundreds of vendors, festival foods, live entertainment, an antique car show, and tens of thousands of visitors, the event is sort of a tribute to the Pine Barrens and local culture. The festival remains canceled for the last two years due to the pandemic.
Not by traveling to some foreign lands – as we had hoped we would do last year and this year, but we did build some memories during our road trips that we took, on occasions, to see our family members, as well as during weekends with the baby and the dogs.
***
An article
published in the Harvard Gazette earlier this year points to the ongoing
pandemic pushing mental health to the breaking point, with the young adults and
the children being the most impacted and the effects likely being long-lasting.
Prior to the pandemic, one in five Americans experienced some sort of mental
illness; the number is now two in five. Michelle Williams, the dean of Harvard
Chan School, says, “it will be months, if not years before we are fully able to
grasp the scope of the mental health issues born out of this pandemic. Long
after we’ve gained control of the virus, the mental health repercussions will likely
continue to reverberate.”
 |
| Harper and Lizzie-I, summer 2020 |
Pandemic fatigue is real. So real.
The World Health Organization describes the fatigue as “demotivated and
exhausted with the demands of life” during the pandemic. And it affects us in
so many unique, different ways. And one of the worst impacts of it is to lose
boundaries of things we do every day. The boundaries vanish as we switch
between dozens of tabs on our computers and mobile phones, streaming TV shows
and podcasts, shopping online, responding to work emails, and attending daily household chores. The average American in 2018 spent more than 200 hours commuting.
However, during the pandemic, as more people are working from home, they have
been working three
hours more daily than they did before.
In a feature article titled
“Living With Depression and Anxiety During a Global Pandemic” in the 5280 – a
city magazine based in Denver, Colorado – Geoff Van Dyke, the editorial
director of the magazine and the writer of the article, aptly sums up the
pandemic fatigue, emotional exhaustion and the stress and monotony of staying
home:
“The darkness comes at night, or in
the morning, or sometimes the late afternoon, in that liminal time between
daytime and nighttime. It doesn’t discriminate. It doesn’t care that I have
work to finish or that I should wash the dishes stacked in the sink or that I
need to check in on how my two boys’ distance-learning schoolwork is going. It
doesn’t care that, after seven months of mostly staying at home, I have already
been examining the uglier recesses of my psyche.”
***
It is unlikely that the world after
the pandemic will return to the world we saw prior to the pandemic. Numerous
trends, with far-reaching consequences, impacting individuals, societies, and
countries, are already under way, and one of the most notables is how the
health crisis has changed businesses across the globe.
The disruption led by the pandemic has
wiped billions of dollars off the auto industry’s profits. Indoor dining in
restaurants will likely not return to normal levels for at least a few years.
COVID-19 has rapidly accelerated the growth of digital healthcare. In the
education sector, while remote/online learning boomed during the pandemic, it
has also augmented existing challenges related to inequalities, inclusion, and
drop-out rates.
 |
| Pro-Trump graffiti, Route 70, NJ. Presidential election, December 2020 |
***
In a New Yorker article titled
“Has the Pandemic Transformed the Office Forever?” published earlier in 2021,
the writer John Seabrook asks an existential question: “What’s an office for?
Is it a place for newbies to learn from experienced colleagues? A way for
bosses to oversee shirkers? A platform for collaboration? A source of friends
and social life? A respite from the family? A reason to leave the house? It
turns out that work, which is what the office was supposed to be for, is
possible to do from somewhere else.”
It took a few decades and a spate of
quiet revolutions to change the way offices are used – stamping out
hierarchies of cubicles and walls and building them into team-based, open-plan
layouts. However, technological advancements in office communications that
brought in digital tools, such as emails, cloud computing systems, virtual team
meetings, and video conferencing, which co-existed with offices in normal times,
found a way to reach their prime exactly when the pandemic began, making a
worker’s presence in offices less essential.
